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X-Men '97

It was a TV ritual that an entire generation quickly became accustomed to. Saturday mornings had long belonged to kids, but starting in early 1993, Saturday mornings belonged to X-Men x-clusively. Kids — viewers of all ages, really — tuned in every week to watch the next chapter of this revolutionary superhero soap opera. Appointment television was nothing new, but when it came to animated shows? X-Men got kids used to the idea of TV shows ending on a cliffhanger every single week. And now with the cartoon continuing on Disney+ as X-Men ’97, that ritual stands at the ready, eager to return… except X-Men ’97 debuted on a Wednesday.

Is there a day of the week that’s more opposite of Saturday than Wednesday? That’s nowhere close to Saturday morning! Plenty of people online noticed this missed opportunity and took Disney to task for relegating Marvel’s mighty mutants to a hump day debut. But if you think that the minds behind X-Men ’97 weren’t right there with all of the fans, think again.

“We talked about it,” answered Brad Winderbaum (X-Men ’97 EP and Marvel Studios Head of TV, Streaming, and Animation) when asked about a Saturday morning debut by Decider. “We talked about it. What it comes down to is just programming and where we think it’s going to get the most attention and eyeballs, but certainly that was one of the first ideas out of the box. The good news is, it’s going to be there for the audience after school just like it was for me.”

And considering just how successful X-Men ’97 has been in the days since its premiere (100% critic and 93% audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes), it’s hard to argue that a Saturday morning release could have gone better than the midweek drop we got. But to assume that the X-Men ’97 creatives weren’t on the exact same wavelength as so many fans, re: a Saturday debut? Come on! These are the masterminds that gave us moments like Gambit charging Wolverine’s claws and Storm’s dynamic desert entrance and Cyclops’ expert landing. They know what X-Men fans want.

“I have to credit [director] Jake Castorena for many of those amazing character intros and bits,” said Winderbaum of the buzziest moments from the show. “Some of that stuff was in his earliest pitch as a director on the show, and he worked closely with [original X-Men director] Larry Houston. He would talk to Larry Houston all the time, about how they did it in the original show. It was that conduit from the original creators to now that I think created all these grand moments on screen.”

And if you want to watch those grand moments unfold, you can always hit “play” on Saturday morning — if you can wait that long to watch a new episode, that is.

X-Men ’97 returns with a brand new episode on Wednesday, March 27 on Disney+.